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Carol Berlin; Framingham, Massachusetts
 “There’s
so much I want a child to leave my class with. The first thing I want
them to leave with is this feeling of confidence, that if they don’t
understand something they can go out and work with what they have and
try and understand and try to answer their questions. I want them to feel
good enough about themselves that they realize it’s okay to have
questions, that questions are good things.”
School at a Glance:
Charlotte Dunning School
Framingham, Massachusetts
Grades: K-5
Enrollment: 509
Ethnicity:
66% White
16% Asian
12% Hispanic
4% African American
Percentage of students receiving free or reduced-price lunch:
15% versus a state average of 29%
When she was in high school, Carol Berlin thought science was incredibly
boring. “I remember… being totally disconnected to anything
going on in science. We read a chapter, and we answered the questions
at the end of the chapter. If you could read, you could do it,
but that didn’t mean you understood it.” She says that changed
when she had children of her own, particularly her son, whose first word,
she
jokes, must have been “why” — “he was very curious
about science and I started exploring with him, and that’s really
when I started teaching science.”
Carol decided to become a teacher,
and when she returned to college to earn her certification, she
focused on science education. “I
took a science methods course at Wheelock College, with two fabulous
teachers who inspired me. They taught me that you don’t have to
have the answers, that you want the children to ask questions.
Very powerful ideas… and
when I started teaching, I felt very empowered to teach science.” For
the past seven years, Carol has been teaching third grade at
the Charlotte Dunning School, in Framingham, Massachusetts.
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